ECMU - As Close to Baptist As You Can Get Without Crossing Over

The Evangelical Christian Missionary Union (ECMU) has been faithful to its own creeds and its published church planting plans in European Russia. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch maintain that “our ecclesiology flows more naturally out of our sense of mission.”[1] ECMU and C&MA express their ecclesiology through practical mission. If Great Commission Church is a typical example of church planting within the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA), then C&MA also exhibits faithfulness to its stated ecclesiology as well. If John S. Hammett’s ecclesiological model as presented in Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches is used as a standard for biblical truth, then ECMU’s ecclesiology in St. Petersburg, Russia, meets those requirements for being biblical. If it is held as a lever for Baptist ecclesiology, then ECMU could be considered either Baptist or at least Baptist-like.  

ECMU is planting new churches mainly in urban centers throughout European Russia. Using each metropolis as a base for launching further work in nearby cities, towns, and villages, ECMU is practicing the same methods as the current master plans of the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (IMB) in many of those cities. Moreover, IMB currently has a missionary presence in four of the same megacities as EMCU in European Russia, so it is no surprise that the two organizations often work together.

Because so much of IMB’s current strategy in European Russia echoes ECMU’s church planting strategy, IMB has chosen to continue to build strategic partnership with ECMU on a variety levels. Through planting churches in large and influential cities of Russia, IMB hopes to develop bases for ongoing church planting throughout Russia. By creating outreach projects based on meeting needs of and providing service to the larger community, IMB hopes to develop the same type of presence that ECMU is establishing. By planting churches that will send and support their own missionaries, IMB hopes to see a church planting movement spread throughout European Russia.[2] IMB has hosted several leadership training events in Moscow and St. Petersburg to train cross-cultural workers for this purpose, and ECMU has participated regularly in these events.

In the European Russian context, an ideal urban church planting ministry should entail the establishment of church planting teams and churches in the megacities. Ideally, it should also entail some type of community outreach that would meet human needs while teaching sound biblical theology. Preferably, churches should be taught the principles of church planting movements and should initiate the sending of their own missionaries for global mission expansion. In reality these are the very activities in which IMB and ECMU has been involved for the past decade, and ECMU has seen an almost five hundred percent increase in churches and members. ECMU is as close to Baptist as you can get without crossing over.

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[1] Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), 31.

[2] David Garrison defines a Church Planting Movement as “a rapid multiplication of indigenous churches planting churches that sweeps through a people group or population segment” in his book, Church Planting Movements: How God is Redeeming a Lost World (Arkadelphia, Ark.: WIGTake, 2004), 21.